The personal computer over the last twenty five years has evolved from an IBM mainframe capable of occupying significant space within a lab, to a compact, 20lbs tower, featuring dual or quad microprocessors, 1GB video cards, enhanced PCI bus expansion slots, 1 terabyte hard drives, multiple operating system platforms, 400 watt power supplies, etc.

The PC has experienced an impressive technological leap, that is unsurpassed. It’s inevitable, that with the wide variety and versatility of applications and hardware that are available in the market today, conflicts, slowdowns, freeze ups, will on occasion, arise. It’s essential to always properly maintain your PC, by installing antivirus and antimalware applications, having utility software to regularly clean up unwanted files, browser cache, cookies, ad banners, etc, as well as keeping up with the latest software updates, of the above applications to maximize the chances, of protecting your system from getting infected.

It is true of course, that there can be many reasons for a PC being slow. A virus may have infected the kernel or other critical components of the operating system, the registry may have been modified, user profile information or security settings were compromised. However, the problem may also lie with unnecessary files cluttering the hard drive to such a degree, that it’s bogging down the overall efficiency of the CPU, thus making it very difficult for main tasks to be completed in a timely manner.

Additionally, having too many applications loading up at startup, can significantly slow operations down as well as not frequently using utilities like Scandisk or Defrag, especially after several applications have been installed or uninstalled, within a relatively, short period of time.

Therefore, if the PC is slow, the best course of action would be to run utilities like CCleaner, registry clean up or optimization applications, antivirus programs that also protect the computer from incoming attacks, antispyware that specifically targets malware, worms, Trojans, etc, as well as shutting down or disabling unnecessary software that loads up on startup.

Keeping up with the latest firewall upgrades, video or sound driver updates, running apps that free up memory, should also be given serious consideration. To the very least ,the above tips should be implemented on a regular basis, to ensure maximum protection as well as peak efficiency.

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Some things I have found out about what makes your computer slow down. The obvious culprit is spyware. Good antivirus and protection software is defiantly the way to go to stop this and keep the spyware off of your computer but there are other things to consider also.

For example when your computer starts up it loads necessary components to operate the computer. Some of these are not necessary for your computer to work or may be extra things leftover. A prime example for me is software that I have changed around on my computer.

A most recent example was I had printer software and drivers on the computer that I did not have the printer for anymore. You can check your start menu options from windows control panel. And also go into add remove programs remove things like your printer software that you may not be using anymore.

Another issue I have seen is a thing called your computer’s registry it’s like a list of how your computer runs all the programs when something is uninstalled it will stay in the registry files I use a free software that does registry repair it is called some antivirus and utilities programs have a registry fixer or cleaner that will help the computer also.

These are some things I have noticed from experience that may cause a computer to slow down sometimes though it is just time to upgrade your computer’s memory or ram. It is depending on your computers model replacing and getting more memory can help improve your performance for a very reasonable price if you are not ready yet to get a new computer.

I find that the software that you use on the computer improves or upgrades constantly putting more demand on your computer’s resources like the memory and over time the computer will get slower. I hope this advice helps some.

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 I will answer this question for Windows users. For those who don’t have windows I give the advice to do the similar things but in any case you have to look how this is done on Linux or MacOs (or whatever).

There are two main cases of slowness: The pc itself is slow or the internet connection is slow. The best thing to find out, if your pc itself is slow, you should download a benchmark test program. You can find many of them on a common search engine (e.g. google or yahoo).

Just type in the search terms benchmark test download and you will find a lot tools and description how you can test if the benchmark output is correllant to you machine. But in most cases it is not your computer that is not fast enough, but the internet connection.

To check this, try the following points. It could be, that your neighbours are surfing together with you, but you don’t know it. Things like that happen, if you have a wireless connection between your router and your computer. To be sure, that this can’t happen anymore, login into your router (he has normally an IP-Adress by itself) and make your internet connection keyword safe.

Best thing to choose is RSA at the moment. To set that, you normally have to directly connect a cable to your router. The next thing is to check all the tasks running in the near of the clock. There are many things, that need to “call at home” permanently. So ask yourself: Do I know this program? Do I need this program?

Another important thing is the system update of windows. If you like to make your computer only in the standby mode, the system can get more and more unsecure. So always drive your system down or manually check, if all updates are always installed.

Very important is a virus checker that is always updated. Antivir is not the best one, but its for free and its better than nothing. Another point are all the places windows has to start programs automatically. Get from sysinternals the autostart checker and put everything away there what you don’t know.

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